Thursday, 30 April 2015

When the Raspberry Pi Foundation launched its new Raspberry Pi 2, we were impressed to hear it would be able to run Windows 10. Admittedly it isn't the full PC version of the operating system, but rather a special version created especially to run on such devices. Yesterday, following the keynote at its Build developer conference, Microsoft released a new build of Windows 10 Insider Preview, but that’s not all. It also pushed out a Windows 10 IoT Core Insider Preview with support for Raspberry Pi 2 and Intel’s Minnowboard Max. So if you have either of those devices, you… [Continue Reading]

How real do you want your racing? Do you want to feel the engine rattle your bones and your stomach drop as you take a banked curve at nearly 200 miles per hour? Get ready, because BenQ, a world-leading human technology and solutions provider - and professional gaming monitor pioneer - today released the ultimate high-performance curved LCD monitor designed for a more immersive racing experience: the XR3501. Created for demanding racing gamers, the XR3501straps players in the driver's seat with its 2000R curvature - the most of any LCD monitor - and extra-wide 21:9 aspect ratio.

Racing gamers want a real driving experience, and that is exactly what the XR3501 delivers in a high-speed feast for the senses that will have players living every heart-pounding moment of the race. Designed with extensive input from experts on and off the track, the XR3501features a full 35-inch screen and 2560x1080 resolution for visuals that will make you brace for every intense turn as you fight to break free of the pack. The 144Hz refresh rate keeps the action flowing smoothly for an experience that is as real as racing gets without a trip to the track.

Monday, 27 April 2015

Allwinner unveiled a Cortex-A7 based SoC for smart connected cameras that integrates its HawkView image signal processor, and supports Linux and “Camdroid.”

Allwinner jumped on the ARM Cortex-A7 spec early, using it for its popular, low-priced system-on-chips like the Allwinner A10, dual-core A20, and quad-core A31. Like the A10, Allwinner’s new “V3″ SoC has a single Cortex-A7 core, in this case clocked to 1.2GHz. However, Like a number of TI’s Linux-focused, DSP-based DaVinci SoCs, the V3 is designed for camera applications. It follows Allwinner V-Series SoCs including the quad-core, Cortex-A7 V10 and Cortex-A8-based V15.

xmodulo: Ubos, which translates to “You are the boss”, is a platform to help intermediately skilled users set up a home server and deploy web apps on it in a most automated way. Leggi Tutto… Source:: Linux Today

Decoding Jeff Jonas (National Geographic) — “He thinks in three—no, four dimensions,” Nathan says. “He has a data warehouse in his head.” And that’s where the work takes place—in his head. Not on paper. Not on a computer. He resorts …

Going back many months there's been work on adding ACPI support to ARM64/AArch64. That long journey may now be wrapping up with a pending pull request for landing full ACPI support for 64-bit ARM in Linux 4.1...

With the announcement of the Steam VR powered HTC Vive at GDC, there are now two very different types of interaction to think about when creating VR games and experiences.

Both the Oculus Rift and Sony Morpheus headsets are designed to be primarily used when stationary. Oculus gets users to sit down whenever they demo their headset in public, facing forwards.

Sony often demonstrates the Morpheus standing up, but players need to remain within a fairly small area, and normally face forwards towards the camera most of the time. I suspect that Sony expect most of their consumers to use the Morpheus whilst sat on a sofa.

With both headsets, you can move your head within a relatively small area, you can rotate your head around, but the hardware works best when you are looking forward. In practice, since most people will play them whilst sat in a chair, your body will tend to stay facing in one direction all the time. Even when standing in Sony’s Heist demo, players face the camera and their movement is limited.

The Steam VR system is different. You are free to walk around, rotate and move within this area, just like you would in real-life. There is no notion of ‘forward’.

The Steam VR system is different. With the HTC Vive, you can define a fairly large area of empty space (demos have been shown using 4.5m x 4.5m) to move within. You are free to walk around, rotate and move within this area, just like you would in real-life. There is no notion of ‘forward’.

The system elegantly warns you when you get close to the edges of your pre-set space, and the long, tangle-free cable is much less of a problem than you’d imagine. The position and rotation of the headset and the two handheld controllers is tracked with millimetre precision by Steam’s Lighthouse tracking technology.

So what are the advantages and disadvantages of these approaches, and how can you design your VR game to work with both systems?

Sit-down, face-forward VR is by far the simplest approach, best demonstrated by the Morpheus. Plug it into your PS4, stick it on your head and play. Simple!

In comparison, setting up a couple of Lighthouse boxes at the right height, clearing a space, plugging everything in to your PC and calibrating it all, is likely to be more time consuming. Plus, there is an argument that playing games whilst being sat down is a more relaxing experience and that some people won’t want to stand up and walk around for long periods of time.

However, the pay-off is that walk-around VR can provide a stronger and richer sense of presence than face-forward VR.

What is presence?

Presence is the belief that you have been teleported to another world – fooling your subconscious into believing that what you are seeing and hearing is real. With presence, you forget the real world, and believe you are actually in another place.

Presence is an analogue scale, ranging from “This world feels completely fake” at one end to “I am totally convinced I am physically here” on the other end. You don’t need 100 per cent presence to have an amazing and emotionally powerful time – in fact, no VR headset currently offers 100 per cent presence. However, being able to move physically around a virtual space rather than using a controller increases the feeling of presence significantly.

Interestingly, too much presence can be a bad thing – the more presence you feel, the more you notice tiny details which aren’t correct, and these can take you out of the experience. So as a developer, unless you can make things perfect, it may be better to set a lower ‘presence’ target, and hit it well. A good example of this is not having a body for the player unless you can do it perfectly. A bad body is much worse than not having one at all.

The Vive controllers and PlayStation Move controllers also have a big advantage over gamepads. The natural instinct of players when they use a VR headset for the first time is to reach out and try to grab things with their hands. With tracked controllers you can do this – including fairly complex interactions such as picking up a bottle, throwing it into the air and catching it again with the other hand. You won’t be surprised to hear that this kind of interaction feels much more realistic than pressing a button or a stick on a gamepad. Combine this with the free movement that Steam VR offers, and it’s a very special experience indeed.

You don’t need 100 per cent presence to have an amazing and emotionally powerful time – in fact, no VR headset currently offers 100 per cent presence.

Movement is one of the biggest game design challenges that we’re facing. Some people find using the right-stick of a controller to rotate whilst simultaneously rotating with their head quite unnerving. There are a variety of control schemes that help alleviate this, but it’s still unclear what will emerge as the best standard.

In contrast, on the HTC headset, you rotate with your body, which is perfectly natural. This means movement is a better experience and the small percentage of people who suffer simulation sickness with VR movement is reduced even further.

The big challenge with walk-around VR is how do you explore environments that are bigger than your play space? What happens if the cargo bay in your game is 5m x 5m and you only have a 2m wide space available in the real world? How do you navigate an open world? Again, these are all solvable problems, but it’s likely that early games will try to solve them in different ways until a standardised method appears.

There are lots of potential solutions all these issues and user testing them is one of our key goals at the moment – we don’t have all the answers yet, but we have a much better idea than we did only a short time ago! This is one reason why VR development is such a fascinating area – there are so many unanswered questions and new game design challenges to sink your teeth into.

VR is a huge uncharted space, and I think our team all feel like explorers at the moment.

nDreams is a UK developer that focuses on virtual worlds and virtual reality. You can find out more about the studio at www.ndreams.com

Bounty programs benefit everyone. Companies like Microsoft get help from security experts, customers gain improved security, and those who discover and report vulnerabilities reap the rewards financially. Or at least that's how things are supposed to work. Having reported a series of security problems to discount and deal site Groupon, security researcher Brute Logic from XSSposed.org was expecting a pay-out -- but the site refuses to stump up the cash. In all, Brute Logic reported more than 30 security issues with Groupon's site, but the company cites its Responsible Disclosure policy as the reason for not handing over the cash. The… [Continue Reading]

The big news coming out of Box Dev 2015 was Box Developer Edition, a new offering that lets app developers build on top of Box's storage and other services without making it obvious they're using Box.

The new product allows developers to use the parts of Box they want—file storage, content previews, and so on—under the hood of their own applications. Users can just use the developer’s app without having to log into Box separately.

In a demonstration of the product in San Francisco at Box Dev 2015, Box’s annual conference for developers, a sample user logged into a dummy healthcare app and gained access to different folders which had content in them. The experience appeared seamless—and Box's role wasn't obvious.

Later, Box engineering executives showed off an administrative dashboard. Developers using the product will have full access to information like all the users of the app, their folders, usage data, and more analytics.

“It doesn’t just integrate with our APIs,” said Box CEO Aaron Levie in a press Q&A following the keynote presentation. “You can actually build on all the technology we have. That’s what the Dev edition is all about. It’s a developer-owned instance of Box. They can store and manage all the content on their platform.”

Currently in a limited beta, Box Developer Edition will have a cost based on the number of users, according to Levie. Data storage will come free since that isn’t the focus, he said.

Most other cloud providers, like Amazon and Google, charge developers based on storage or bandwidth used. This could make Box Developer Edition appealing to certain kinds of developers, but without details on the pricing, it's hard to know how competitive the offering will be and for which apps Box will end up being cheaper or have more of the right features.

“[The value of Box Developer Edition] has far less to do with storage and way more to do with workflow in your app that Box is enabling,” said Levie.

Ex-Blizzard CCO Rob Pardo is partnering with Unity to serve as a creative advisor to its game-making community.

He will tour the globe and visit developers across North America, Europe and Asia to discuss the creative process, game design and industry trends.

Pardo will also visit individual studios and appear at select local Unity community developer groups to share advice.

A full itinerary for his tour will be published at a later date.

“After years steeped in the games business, my passion remains the same at its core: I love games, discussing design and creative process and I find it fascinating to see how different people work differently,” said Pardo.

“We’re seeing a new golden age of games currently with an amazing catalogue of games, with more breadth and diversity than ever before; there’s something for everyone. Whether you’re into hardcore triple-A shooters, deep strategy games, quirky platformers, or more avant garde indie fare, it’s an embarrassment of riches.

“I am very much looking forward to my tour and I hope to meet many developers with different team sizes, genres and platforms. I’ll see developers creating free to play mobile games and others who are creating premium triple-A games for PC and console. I hope to offer insights from my experience designing games, serve as a sounding board for ideas, and simply sit down to muse together about game design in the new shape of our industry.

“Hopefully the knowledge shared and gained in these meetings will make it outside the walls where they take place. I’ll try to do my part in that sense by writing about my experiences while traveling the world. You’ll be able to see those thoughts on the Unity blog.”

The former Blizzard CCO has worked on a number of titles for the company, including as lead designer on World of Warcraft and StartCraft: Brood War. He left the developer in July 2014 after 17 years with the developer.

Thursday, 23 April 2015

Perfect Security (99% Invisible) — Since we lost perfect security in the 1850s, it has has remained elusive. Despite tremendous leaps forward in security technology, we have never been able to get perfect security back. History of physical security, relevant …

There has been some great work done with getting Tizen running on different development boards, and today I am pleased to see that its the time for the Raspberry PI 2 Dev Board to get some Tizen love courtesy of the Samsung Open Source group. Tizen is an Important Operating System (OS) within Internet of Things (IoT) and therefore it made sense for Tizen to come to the Raspberry Pi, which is the most popular single-board computer with more than 5 million sold.

Tuesday, 21 April 2015

BB-8 the new droid in the star wars franchise made his first public appearance (YouTube link) at Star Wars Celebration last week. While cast and crew of the movie have long said that BB-8 is real, seeing it up on stage, driving circles around R2D2 takes things to a whole new level. The question remains, how exactly does it work?

Our (and probably any other tech geek worth their salt’s) immediate reaction was to think of xkcd’s “New Pet” comic. All the way back in 2008, [Randall Munroe] suggested omnidirectional wheels and magnets could be used to create exactly this …read more

Hot on the heels of discovery that the BB-8 Droid from the new Star Wars movie is real, [Christian Poulsen] has made the very own miniature version of it!

It’s a brilliantly simple hack actually. Remember the Sphero? It’s a remote controlled ball you can drive around with your phone — great fun, but surprisingly not many people have hacked it…

The ball has an internal structure that allows it to roll around with ease. Which also means it has a fixed up direction — at least inside of the ball. All [Christian] had to do was crack it …read more

Google wants all apps developed for its Cardboard VR headset to work properly with, well, any version of its device. That's tougher than it sounds, since the headset's open-source, and a lot of companies and individual users are tweaking it to their ...

Shoot ‘em up Kit

The Shoot ‘em up Kit is built by UK developer Tall Studios and is aimed at the hobbyist market. The engine has also attracted interest from educational establishments and indies looking for a quick prototyping tool, and is being used by Tall Studios itself to make titles for Steam and the Windows Store.

Features include a drag-and-drop interface to create 2D and 3D games without any scripting or programming, realistic and arcade-style physics, support for animation, customisable AI, lighting, a particle editor, video playback and also graphical and Lua scripting.

The engine is priced at a single cost of £29.95 and is available for use on PC, from Windows XP through to Windows 8. Users are then free to distribute the games they create royalty-free.

Version 2 of the game engine is set to be released publicly this month.

GameGuru

GameGuru is The Game Creators’ new engine that aims to make 3D games development more accessible than ever, and is available to purchase for a one-off cost of £14.99, no royalties.

The firm already has experience with development tools such as the App Game Kit and FPS Creator, and has been developing GameGuru for more than two years. The engine is targeted at both the hobbyist and smaller commercially-minded studios, and can be used to build 3D game worlds from within the game itself – without the need for any coding.

This doesn’t mean developers can’t delve further into the tech however, with additional options to go deeper into the tool’s features. The engine includes a terrain editor, an infinite vegetation system, AI systems and a rendering engine that supports level of detail, cascade shadow mapping, baked shadowing and ambient occlusion mapping.

Further features are planning in future, such as a character creator, building construction kit, improved AI, enhanced explosions and particle effects, under water swimming and effects, HUD systems, a compass tool, map and investory and extra characters and game assets.

Cocos2d-x

The Cocos2d-x game engine is used by more than 400,000 developers and has traditionally been most popular in China, with numerous top-grossing games said to be built upon the tool, such as Badland (pictured).

The open source engine is run by Chukong Technologies and is designed to be used as both a rapid prototyping tool and for a polished, full release. It’s been written completely in C++ and has been optimised for numerous devices including iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows and HTML5.

Other tools are also available from Chinese tech company Chukong, such as Cocos2d-js for building games in JavaScript, Code IDE for developing games with Lua and javaScript and free game development toolkit

Cocos Studio.

Adventure Game Studio

It’s been around for years now, but Adventure Game Studio doesn’t often get the coverage or publicity it arguably deserves.

The tool is free and open source and, unsurprisingly, is ideally suited to the creation of adventure games. The AGS editor is a Windows-based IDE, and lets developers do anything from importing graphics and writing game scripts right through to game testing. Other features for the toolset include a script editor, script debugger and built-in support for translating your game text to different languages.

Supported platforms for the engine include Windows, Linux and Mac. Titles such as Resonance (pictured), Cart Life and Heroine’s Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok have all been developed with AGS, plus countless more from its still vibrant developer community.

As well as being useful for the development of commercial games, the tool is also suitable for the quick prototyping of games. A public repository for the engine’s development is available on GitHub.

Clickteam Fusion

Clickteam Fusion is another engine that, like many on this list, can be used to design games with little to no programming.

Perhaps one of the most high profile games to use the development environment is popular Steam title and YouTube hit Five Nights at Freddy’s (pictured), created by Scott Cawthon, though numerous other games have also taken advantage of the tool, including Freedom Planet.

Clickteam UK director Simon Pittock recently told Develop that both seasoned developers and newcomers alike will find themselves at home with its tools, which offer an extensive library of free add-on objects. The engine features a custom written native run-time for iOS, Android, HTML5, Flash and PC.

Fusion 2.5, its latest release, includes Box 2D physics, and the company has also just launched the Clickstore where developers can purchase and sell assets and extensions, much like is seen with Unity and Unreal Engine.

Construct 2

Built by UK outfit Scirra, Construct 2 has been downloaded more than two million times. The easy-to-use engine contains a drag and drop interface that allows aspiring creators with little to no development experience to make a game. It’s also a useful piece of kit for experienced developers looking to prototype new ideas quickly or for those who want a faster alternative to coding.

The HTML5 game creator is designed specifically for 2D games, and includes features such as an events system that lets users create events by selecting possible conditions and actions from a list, instant preview, 70 WebGL-based pixel shader effects, a particles plug-in and more.

ChilliSource

ChilliSource is a new free, open source engine from Scottish studio Tag Games, which we covered extensively in the previous issue of Develop.

The tool, which comes under the wider development package ChilliWorks, was initially created to power its in-house projects, but the firm is now sharing it with other developers, as well as a raft of metrics tools and a collection of back-end services, including for IAPs and leaderboards.

The game engine features 2D and 3D support, networking, shader support, a GUI for different resolutions, C++ 11, modular and extensible lighting and shadows, skinned animation and more.

ChilliWorks has been used in titles such as Mind Candy’s Moshi Monsters Village, Ubisoft’s Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes and Tag Games’ own Funpark Friends (pictured).

Tag is currently calling for developers to help it work on the project.

Twine

Its name is known by many throughout games development, but few have actually dabbled with Twine, a tool used for creating interactive fiction.

This genre of gaming has been making a comeback in recent times and now comes under its own interactive fiction section on Steam, and Twine is one of the top tools for making these types of titles, while it also works well as a useful and quick prototyping tool.

Another open source tool that is free for commercial use, Twine does not require users to write any code to create a story, though projects can be extended with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS and JavaScript.

The tool publishes directly to HTML, meaning creators can post there work in numerous places.

Twine 2 was released last year, making it browser-based and also offering Linux support in what was regarded as a significant update for the tool.

PlayCanvas

Founded in 2011 and built by a London firm of the same name, PlayCanvas sets itself apart from many other engines by enabling developers to build their games completely in the cloud.

The Develop Award-nominated HTML5 engine houses numerous features and tools to build 3D games for browser and mobile devices, such as real-time editing that allows collaboration with remote team members at the same time.

The tool comes in a number of different packages including a free option for commercial games with storage space of up to 200MB. For this however, projects will be in the public eye and is for teams up to two.

Other indie licensing packages use subscription models from $15 to $60 a month depending on the size of the team, number of projects and storage space required.

Further for organisations making more than $100k a year are also available up to $400 a month, as are expanded support packages.

MonoGame

MonoGame is a free open source implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4 Framework and has gathered a large community since Microsoft’s own abandonment of the XNA development framework.

Last month, the developers behind the tool reached a major milestone following the release of update 3.3 – the XNA framework is no longer required to use MonoGame. This means MonoGame developers can now fully develop their games on Windows 7, 8, 8.1, MacOS (using MonoDevelop) and Linux.

MonoGame has been used to develop games over 100 games, such as Matt Makes Games’ Towerfall: Ascension, Tribute Games’ Mercenary Kings and Supergiant Games’ Transistor.

The tool can be used for both 2D and 3D games, and leverages C# and other .NET languages. The recently released update also added a number of enhancements and functions, and all the tools and content pipeline are now built for 64-bit.

Torque 2D and 3D

Both Garage Games’ Torque 2D and Torque 3D tools have been made available as open source software and used by a wide variety of developers.

Torque 2D supports platforms including Mac, PC and iOS, and includes the complete C++ source code to the engine, as well as scripting language TorqueScript, which allows developers to write gameplay logic on Windows or OS X and have it work on other platforms. Also included are the usual rendering tools, the Box2D physics system and the OpenAL sound library.

Torque 3D meanwhile features a suite of tools including shape, terrain, decal and particle editors, lighting tools, Nvidia PhsyX integration for destructible objects and cloth and rigid body dynamics. The toolset also houses a renderer that includes shader features such as per-pixel dynamic lighting, normal and parallax occlusion mapping, screen space ambient occlusion and more.

CopperCube 5

Last year Ambiera released the fifth version of its game engine and editor CopperCube.

The development platform can be used to create 3D games, apps and even websites, without the need for programming, though a scripting API is available for advanced users.

Latest additions and improvements to the engine include terrain support with its own terrain editor, a physics engine for the native targets, video playback in 2D and 3D, network communication, iOS 8 WebGL support, shader programming, animation blending, directional light and more.

Basic and Professional versions of the engine are available for purchase. The Basic edition, which costs £76.98, includes many of the tool’s features but does not contain video playback or Oculus Rift support, and developers have 10 maximum amount of scenes per document. The Professional edition is available for £295.47.

More game engines

There is a plethora of game engines and development frameworks out there for all different kinds of developers. We’ve added a selection of more tools for you to check out should you still be looking for something to fit your needs. Don't forget you can check out more profiles from last year's list of the top 16 game engines for 2014 here.

No, you haven't stumbled across an internet video from 1997 -- that's the output of one of the cleverest cameras you'll see in a while. Columbia University researchers have developed a self-powered camera whose pixels both record light and turn it in...

Facebook Biometrics Cache (Business Insider) — Facebook has been accused of violating the privacy of its users by collecting their facial data, according to a class-action lawsuit filed last week. This data-collection program led to its well-known automatic face-tagging service. …

Nokia could soon be the largest maker of mobile phone network equipment in the world ahead of Ericsson and Huawei. It just acquired French telecom equipment maker Alcatel-Lucent for 15.6 billion euros ($16.6 billion), or more than double the $7 billi...

Saturday, 18 April 2015

Paris has been hit with a spate of anonymously-piloted drones flying over key landmarks, government buildings and even a nuclear power station. It's not been clear if it's a group of amateurs with bad timing or something more coordinated, which has s...

Friday, 17 April 2015

GDC saw significant announcements from Unity and Epic. Unreal Engine 4 has gone free – plus a five per cent royalty fee on gross revenue – while Unity has revamped its Free and Pro packages.

Developers can now get access to the entire Unity 5 engine for free with the Personal addition, while the $75 per month Professional package, a price that has stayed consistant from Unity 4, now offers new Cloud services, analytics and performance reporting.

Valve is also set to make its own waves in the space with the completely free Source 2 engine, available to both developers and players interested in creating content for their favourite games. Meanwhile Autodesk teased plans for its new Stingray engine.

Despite the tech giant’s roster of tools, it will be hard pushed to charge a significant fee for Stingray, given the low-priced nature of its fierce competitors in the space.

And let’s not to forget the plethora of other excellent game engines available to developers (We'll be profiling more this week).

Set them free

Moves by the engine giants paint a picture of an industry that, affected by the indie revolution years back, have almost been forced to lower their prices to ensure they aren’t missing out on the millions of devs out there looking for the right tools.

In Epic’s case, though last year’s turn to a subscription model saw the community grow by a factor of 25, money up-front still proved to be a hurdle for some.

“Just the effort of having to enter a credit card into a website is a barrier for people nowadays,” said Epic CEO Tim Sweeney. “There is so much great stuff available that doesn’t have any barrier to entry at all. We met a large number of people who just hadn’t jumped in yet because of the paywall associated with it. In restrospect, I see exactly where they are coming from.”

Sweeney added that having so many tools available for free is liberating for developers, who can download them at a click of a button on their computer to test them out.

“It’s a great business model. It’s great for users and it’s great for developers,” he continued. “It means that anybody can try anything and then choose the best among all the options. It’s a much superior model I think. Especially with commercial software, having to go and pay usually hundreds of dollars to buy a 3D package and then potentially realise you bought the wrong one.”

Unity has long been available for free, but with Epic moving to a free base model and CryEngine adopting a low subscription fee last year, does this mean Unity has lost its unique selling point in the market? Not so, says a feisty John Riccitiello, the firm’s new CEO.

“No one makes the complete package we do, not even close,” he said. “What Unity allows, and the ease of use of Unity to build content on multiple platforms of the high quality we allow users or developers to do, is really unmatched out there.

“I also don’t think that a royalty model is particularly democratic. If someone achieves significant success, it ends up being a ridiculous axe on success. And we’re really not about being a cap on success.”

How low can they go?

A race to the bottom seems apparent then in th e game engine space. The healthy competition between fierce rivals after the largest slice of the pie has driven down prices – as clearly have industry shifts toward independent development.

But if you speak to Sweeney or Riccitiello, there’s no race occurring. Both are adamant they are setting out their own paths that will ultimately lead to better tools for developers.

Free means that anybody can try anything and then choose the best among all the options.

Tim Sweeney, Epic Games

“I certainly don’t see it,” said Sweeney of a race to the bottom. “I think what you’ll see is developers able to try everything, choose the best technology for them, and ship games that are better, significantly better than what they would have been able to create with what was readily available just a few years ago.

“All along during this time there have been some open source engines you can go and download for free. Now everything is available for free. I don’t think it’s a race to the bottom; what we’re seeing now is games development going mainstream.”

Riccitiello said Unity’s ‘race’ “involves a 12-year commitment to solving partner problems so developers don’t have to”, and one that it is spending tens of millions a year to achieve.

“If others are doing that [racing to the bottom] they will at some point be unable to make the investments they need to make to actually make a worthy product,” he said.

In defence of paid

One firm that isn’t offering its engine for free, yet at least, is Crytek. It introduced a subscription fee for CryEngine last year, but that’s as far it’s willing to go, co-founder Faruk Yerli told Develop.

He explained that while the firm still maintained a segment for those triple-A developers after a different kind of licence, the subscription package was for indies looking for solid techn but perhaps do not need access to the source code. It’s a deal Yerli feels is fair and is reluctant to alter the model.

“Royalties for us were an issue,” he said. “Because we don’t want to ask a small developer to share your profit with us. If you make one game successful and you want to make a bigger one next time, then let’s talk about that game, we don’t want to milk your first one, it’s fully yours.”

But where does that leave Crytek in the market now? Can CryEngine compete when so many other options are available to use freely, or at least try at no cost? Yerli explained how Crytek sees the industry, in terms of the type of developers there are.

“With CryEngine, Crytek is going to the high-end,” he explained. “There is a low-end, mid-end and a high-end, when you classify good tech. Unity wants the low-end part.

He added: “Unreal is coming from, I would say, mid-end to high-end. But they also want to do the low-end. Which I would say is a bit tricky. But if you have a certain success you can do it, it’s not impossible.”

One brave new company entering the 3D game engine space is tech giant Autodesk, which already develops a swathe of tools under its Gameware label such as Scaleform, HumanIK, Beast, Navigation and other useful software including Maya and 3ds Max

Breaking in

Called Stingray and built on the BitSquid engine acquired in June last year, the firm’s product marketing expert Wesley Adams said the firm aims to build a tool that will “drastically improve the way 3D games are made”. But Autodesk will be hard pressed to charge a high fee for it.

When asked for his opinion on the lowering of prices from the top engine makers – he was not yet prepared to disclose potential licensing options for Stingray – Adams said the moves weren’t necessarily good or bad, but just reflected a need to change the way tools are purchased by developers.

“For example, at Autodesk, we created low cost monthly subscription plans for Maya LT,” he said.

“That was new for the 3D industry at the time, but today is standard. And subscription models are how the vast majority of indies use Maya LT. Changes like this are great because it makes it easier for more creative people to get into game-making.”

The industry’s top engine providers are all confident that moving to lower-entry pricing models is the best option for both them and developers. For creators, it’s one of the best eras ever to be making games, no doubt, but tools firms will need to make sure they remain competitive with the fierce and extremely competent rivals. There’s no going back.